Spencer Black points out that Gov. Scott Walker's economic record is dismal by any reasonable measure: Forbes magazine has Wisconsin last in short-term job growth, next to last in long-term job growth, while the Bureau of Labor Statistics has Wisconsin in the bottom tenth in wage growth and damn near that in overall job growth. But when Hillary Clinton runs this ad, Scott Walker will just make like George W. Bush and complain about all the negativity in political ads. The "liberal" media will roll over for that meme, but Ms. Clinton doesn't have to.

In a stunning development, the Nebraska legislature just overwhelmingly voted to abolish the death penalty, though Nebraska's Governor insists he'll veto the legislation if/when it hits his desk. In case you were wondering, Nebraska is the only American state with a unicameral (one-house) legislature, can foil a gubernatorial veto with a mere three-fifths vote (versus two-thirds), and subjects bills to three separate votes before passing them (of which the aforementioned vote was only the first).

Finally, the Straight Dope tackles the question: "How Safe is the Cloud?" And answers: fairly safe (given the amount of server redundancy cloud services have), though inconveniences could happen. Left unaddressed are your privacy concerns, especially significant in our post-warrant dystopia, and whether corporations will push us into cloudland more for their convenience than ours. I imagine it won't be long before they stop making external hard drives, even though it's dangerous to simply discard old technologies when new ones come along -- though folks who only care about the short term (which number comprises, by the evidence, a vast majority of CEOs) don't ever think that way.

Alec Mento's *Penny Rants* books help you relive the horrors of the last 14 years of American politics, but with an improbable optimism and (per Kirkus Reviews) an "acerbic flair" and "a talent for distilling complex ideas into quickly digestible parts." And you can only get these books at Blunt Instruments; click the photo above (or type blunteye.com into your browser) to get them!